waterline.
A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were
clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big
iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin
funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the
torpedo ram, _Thunder Child_, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue
of the threatened shipping.
Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my
brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and
he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to
sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus
sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less
formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was
pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new
antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the
giant was even such another as themselves. The _Thunder Child_ fired no
gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not
firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did
not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her
to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.
She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway
between the steamboat and the Martians a diminishing black bulk against
the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.
Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a
canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and
glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding
torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the
watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their
eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.
They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as
they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like
generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and
a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven
through the iron of the ship s side like a white-hot iron rod through
paper.
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